A place to share my thoughts, ideas, and experience in matters I deal with as part of my daily work.

Sunday, September 18, 2011

UX Vs UI - Which Came First?

Tweet
While the argument of which came first, the chicken or the egg, continues, one may contemplate also as to which came first, User Experience (UX) of User Interface (UI).

Terminology-wise User Interface came first. We used to create UIs without caring, contemplating on, or considering the overall user experience. Actually some of us have designed UIs without even considering the User.

Conceptually and also methodologically, User Experience precedes the User Interface. In properly crafted applications, user experience design comes first and out of the UX design the UI is formed.

From the user point of you, the UI comes as the first touch point of the application and the UI together with many other factors which are just as important produce the overall UX.

The following simple, short and funny video by Kai Brunner shows exactly that. It also shows how using a user-feedback iterative design a new UI is formed to create a new, and hopefully improved UX. And so on.

Tweet
It is important to remember that applications must provide great positive user experience and that great positive user experience requires much more than a well-designed user interface. It requires also good performance, the right amount of data (not too little but not too much), functionality and service that are not necessarily visible, sense of reliability which is achieved by application robustness, familiarity and more.

And most importantly do not mix and confuse “design” with “decoration”. It is worth to discuss the difference between the two, but that is for a different post.